Tag: obama

Local Democrats still incognito when President Obama visits?

The background: Politico did an article on how Democrats across the land who have tough battles ahead in 2012 are kind of… avoiding… the President these days.  The quote below comes right after the article in question noted that most sitting North Carolina Democrats were distinctly unwilling to get within camera range of Barack Obama:

“[Obama] may end up being Walter Mondale of 1984,” said Raleigh-based Democratic strategist Brad Crone, recalling how the only elected official who risked being seen with the party’s nominee that year was the longtime agriculture commissioner.

Man.  Those ag commissioners are afraid of nothing, huh?  Must be all that contact with genetically engineered food.  No, really: I hear that the latest generation of GM corn has taken to carrying around switchblades and hassling the rutabagas. Continue reading Local Democrats still incognito when President Obama visits?

#rsrh Politico’s Obama fundraising myth.

Alternate title: The Silence of the Unicorns.

Politico wrote an entertaining enough article on the way that Obama’s 2008 bundlers aren’t going to be Obama’s 2012 bundlers, for various and sundry reasons (including a certain disillusionment with the President); but they made one big howler in the third paragraph: “Campaign officials deny that there’s any “enthusiasm gap,” and indeed the new operation appears to be on track to raise as much money as Obama did in his record-setting 2008 campaign.”  If you click the link, it’s to an older Politico article that gives a number of $86 million for Obama’s second quarter fundraising. Jim Geraghty goes off on this being representative of the President being on track: if trends continue Jim calculates that “[Obama] will raise $602 million, significantly less than the $750 million he raised in the 2008 cycle.”

But even that’s not true. The real number – the one that you have to use if you want to compare it to the $750 million total from the 2008 election cycle – was more around 47 million (the rest represents the DNC).  Punch those numbers in (and assume equal distribution*) and Obama is currently looking at a $375 million dollar haul.  That number will change – if for no other reason than the President’s total-to-date reflects a later absolute starting date this cycle, compared to the last cycle**8 – but for right now he’s in the hole.

Moe Lane

*A counter-argument at this point is that the President is going to replicate the flow of his fundraising – which is to say: 14% of his total will occur in the first year, and the remainder in the second.  With that metric: if it happens, then he is barely going to come within spitting distance of $750 million (note that Politico would then be correct by accident, given that they’re conflating DNC money with OfA money in their original post).  To which I laconically reply: if.

**While simultaneously being an extremely early starting date for an incumbent.  Welcome to politics: here’s your accordion.

#rsrh Moe Lane is wrong about something.

My post Saturday on the obama as a unit of measurement (found here and here) had a bad math error that rather drastically overstated the amount of hypocrisy typically shown by Democrats about big contributor money when Obama is compared to Tim Pawlenty (they’re only being 588x as hypocritical, not 10,000x) .  This was brought to my attention, and the data has been since corrected.

My apologies for any inconvenience.

#rsrh Obama wants to bring a scalpel…

…to a – sorry, words are failing me.  Jim Geraghty:

At the president’s news conference, ABC News’ Jake Tapper just asked Obama if he was willing to make cuts to this year’s budget, as a “down payment” on future budget cuts.

Obama says he wants to work with Republicans, but that he doesn’t want to make “a series of symbolic cuts this year that endanger the recovery.” He talks about the danger of “tens of thousands of layoffs in state and local government” or poor performance in the “core functions” of the government.

“Let’s use a scalpel, not a machete,” Obama says.

Continue reading #rsrh Obama wants to bring a scalpel…

#rsrh Newsweek declares Obama to be Shiva…

…Destroyer of Worlds.

Via Drudge, which unaccountably fails to point out that Newsweek has casually declared the President to be in the process of destroying the universe itself.  This is undoubtedly the harshest criticism of Obama that I have seen all year, even inadvertently*.

Meanwhile, while looking for more on this topic, I came across this:

Wow.  I’m going to have to start reading The Cat in the Hat to my kid, again.  Who knew that it was an allegory for Nataraja?… and if the rest of the world did already know that, please make sure that I get those memos in the future, OK?

Moe Lane

*Judging from the cover, the article associated with it will apparently try to argue that the job of the Presidency is too big for one man; which is of course the standard excuse that Democrats use when one of its Presidents has come down with a case of raging incompetence.

#rsrh You mispelled ‘schmuck,’ Mr. President. (NSFW)

At least, on our side.  We talk about you like you are a schmuck – which, while rude, also has no relationship to ‘dog’ whatsoever*.

“Some powerful interests that have been setting the agenda in Washington for a long time, and they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog.”

However, I would find it very believable that Democratic powerful interests may in point of fact speak of you in such a fashion.  Long tradition in your party leadership, and all that.

Very long.

Moe Lane

*Not to plumb the depths of Yiddish – a language which has almost as checkered and crooked a past as English does – but ‘schmuck’ usually carries the connotation of ‘penis’ (or, more vulgarly, ‘dick’).  Of course, several Yiddish words of roughly equivalent meaning have been known to creep into the language – thus making it tricky to determine which one is best for the job – but that’s part of Yiddish’s charm: it taps into all the languages that Yiddish speakers picked up while they were being kicked around Europe and being put on various enemies’ lists by clinical paranoids.

You simply have to be resigned to that.

Obamacare in the Age of Scrutiny.

Interesting what people can take from a picture. Case in point:

When Glenn put up a post using it, he focused on the brutal elegance of that sign message:”You vote for Obamacare, we vote for your opponent.”  Which, by the way: we will.  But what I took away from it was primarily the guy with the camera.

I’ve written this before, and now I’ll write it again: never go to a protest or political event without video recording equipment.  I usually recommend a Flip, but I discovered at CPAC that my Canon PowerShot SD1200IS is actually a perfectly suitable emergency video camera in its own right.  Or you can just use your cell phone.  Whatever it is, have something that you can use when circumstances warrant. Our opponents have not yet internalized the idea that every action and every word that they utter for the rest of their lives can be saved for posterity: be sure to take advantage of that.

And remember: if it wasn’t recorded, it didn’t happen.  That’s the drawback of having video recorders everywhere; it’s much harder to convince people that something occurred when there’s no footage available.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Another for the ‘Libertarians for Obama’ file.

You know: the circular one. Via Slashdot:

Despite having had some time to get their act together, Obama’s Department of Justice has filed yet another brief defending the RIAA’s outlandish statutory damages theory — that someone who downloaded an mp3 with a 99-cent retail value, causing a maximum possible damages of 35 cents, is liable for from $750 to $150,000 for each such file downloaded, in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum.

Not that anybody should have believed that errant nonsense in the first place, of course: expecting a Democrat to favor less government in anything is more or less the Platonic Ideal of an oxymoron.  They’re not really permissive of other people’s customs or viewpoints, you know.  It’s just that a couple of the customs and viewpoints that they’re ferociously attempting to impose happen to overlap with some of those of the libertarians’.

Just the messenger, folks.  Just the messenger.

Moe Lane

PS Via Instapundit, and Glenn is hitting this theme himself today.

An Education Department that can’t spell.

You’d think that the slapdash sorts in this particular administration would check to make sure that they spelled quite simple words properly in their media advisories:

schoochildren-tn

Then again, you’d also expect them to check to see whether a major Presidential address to schoolchildren was actually taking place after the start of everybody’s school year*.

Moe Lane

*Alternatively, we can all stop pretending that the White House was not planning to use this speech to push the Democrats’ health care rationing bill.

Crossposted to RedState. And posted with malice aforethought, of course.